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Let's look at why customer service is so important to your bottom line.

The goal of every business is profit, right? I believe that improving your customer experience can be a clever and specific tactic of your business objective to achieve more income, lowered costs.

Cost of a lost customer.

Having a good experience doing business with you brings people back. Think of the long term value of this (I wrote a column - read it here - about my conversation with a supermarket manager that I represented $500,000 in business to the store.) Of the 700 emails I received in reply to the story in my newsletter, over 200 wrote in stories of their experiences and the majority all said they won't go back to the establishment.

Let's say you run a café in a business district. A regular client might spend $72 a month on take away coffees . If something chases them away - like a snippy employee, your lost income is at least $720 a year ($720 for 10months); $2,160 over 3 years. Just from one customer.

Multiplier effect

Now what if that customer tells his colleagues "Don't go to that café'?. Multiply business lost by people told. Bad service or processes that chase people away has an actual cost to you.

The customer will probably tell 13 other people about their bad experience. Canadian research found 50% of people surveyed said they had avoided doing business with a company simply because of a bad story they had heard. If it's the buzz around the office - you could lose a potential of 13 regular customers to a neighboring café. If they were only 1/5th as regular as the 'lost' customer, that would be $1872 per annum.

The cost of poor customer service and thus a bad experience is loss of actual revenue and loss of potential revenue.

It gets worse

Now with the ease of commenting online and Google's omnivorous appetite for collating details, any review of your establishment = good or bad will be recorded on your Google map listing. And if someone rants about a business, what new person will ignore it?